In wireless systems, it is often desirable to transmit advertisement and/or request information which can be used by other devices to determine whether or not it is desirable to establish a communications session with the device transmitting the information. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, including limited communications resources and/or protocol issues, it may be undesirable to transmit advertisements and/or requests in the format in which they are used by higher level modules such as application modules. In addition to possible transmission constraints, the failure of some communications protocols in a standard communications stack to support protocols and/or identifiers in the form in which they are transmitted over an air link, may complicate the ability of a higher level module to initiate transmission of advertisements and/or requests since message information may be lost as a message, advertisement or request is passed from one module to the next in a conventional communications protocol stack.
In view of the above discussion it should be appreciated that there is a need for improved discovery, for example, advertisement and request discovery mechanisms. While not necessary for all embodiments, it is desirable that at least some embodiments address the problem of possible loss of information, e.g., as the result of processing by one or more protocol conversion modules, and provide a way of supplying application, advertisement, request, or other information which may have been omitted from a broadcast during a discovery broadcast time period.
Based on the above discussion, it should be appreciated that there is a need for improved discovery mechanisms suitable for, e.g., wireless communications systems.